Barry Tompkins: I can't escape a world of boxes

Bay Area sportscaster Barry Tompkins sits in a restaurant on Monday, Aug. 22, 2011, in Fairfax, Calif. He began his career in San Francisco in 1965 and has worked for HBO and Fox Sports Net. He is known for his work as a boxing commentator, but has covered football and other sports. He lives nearby in Ross.
(IJ photo/Frankie Frost
Frankie Frost

BOXES. I'm living in a world of them. I see them everywhere. I dream about them.

I can't get away from boxes. I even do boxing for a living. I have box seats for the Giants. For the past month it feels like all my life is composed of boxes. I've seen so many things that say "This end up" I don't know which end is up.

I don't know exactly where but I'm sure somewhere, living quietly in some dark corner of one of the many storage units we've managed to fill in the last 30 days, there is a box full of boxes.

If there's anything that anyone of you, my loyal readers, would like to borrow, I've got it, and I know exactly where it is. In a box. Someplace.

It all began with my son, who gives new meaning to the term pack rat. If any of you watches the TV reality program "Storage Wars," my son's version of that show is "Nuclear Holocaust Storage Wars." When I think of how many boxes it took to clear out the area formerly known as Ryan's Rec Room (or more aptly "Wreck" room), I can't help but think of the old joke about a guy who applies for a job in a logging camp and, when asked where he'd worked before said, "I worked in the Sahara Forest." To which his potential employer replied, "The Sahara is a desert, not a forest." "Sure, now," the guy answered. Well, whatever forest gave up its trees to make enough boxes for our son to clear out his "collectables," I have no doubt is now a desert.

Meanwhile, we borrowed used boxes to load up our own things, which, while pale in comparison to our son's tonnage, still would have been enough to sink the Titanic even if it hadn't hit an iceberg.

We thought about getting new boxes but in the interest of recycling and our thorough commitment to cutting back on the world's excessive pulp production, we opted for used ones. This proved both good and bad. Economically and ecologically we feel we've done our part for global warming. I have no idea how but it makes me feel better to just think so.

The downside was that the boxes we got were previously used to move a school and even though we've marked them as "Kitchen," "Bedroom," etc., we'll still probably have movers driving all over Marin County looking for the library and the principal's office. Imagine the surprise on the face of the principal of Terra Linda High School when he or she gets a box full of Jockey shorts and a potato peeler.

So here we now sit in moving limbo. Out of one place and waiting to move to our new one. We are now encamped in a one-month, one-bedroom rental while our boxes are spread all over the county like bees pollinating a rose bush. I can't remember what's in any of them; my son's "collectables" are packed so tightly in a storage unit that were he to try to find any one thing in there it would be a more difficult mission than locating Osama bin Laden was for the Navy Seals, and I'm flat out of Jockey shorts and can't find the potato peeler.

So, if you see me in the next few weeks, please remember, "Handle with care," I'm fragile.